As the City Falls

Their entire life has been building up to this moment. As the sun's morning rays slowly warm the earth, the winged sisters emerge from the base of the tree which has been their home for their entire life.

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As they emerge from the safety of the nest, the pulses of regulatory pheromones that once kept order in this great colony now mandate its collapse and the exodus of its propogators. While they heat themselves and prepare to use their wings for the first and only time, fierce predators and opportunists flock to the proteinaceous smorgasbord. They prowl among them, killing and eating anything in sight. The defensive soldiers come to join the fight, but their valiant attempts do little to save the lives of their winged siblings. This is a numbers game, and for every predator that comes to dine, there are hundreds of reproductively active termites, all fueled by the innate desire to survive, disperse, and mate.

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They all take wing at once as if a starting gun had been fired. Their backlit silhouettes rise simultaneously and fill the air like waves of amber-colored snow. Dragonflies, great flying beasts hundreds of times their weight, cut through the air, snapping them up as fast as they can ingest them. With their civilization crumbling behind them and their siblings being killed by aerial hunters and prowling predators, the survivors will travel as far as they can in the hope that they will someday found a civilization as as great as the one that produced them.